Gillespie County, Texas — For the last year, Mark Cook has been preaching a kind of low-tech, election-doubting gospel in political battlegrounds across the country. "But we're told: trust the machines..
.and that is a way to manipulate an election," Cook recently said at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Traveling by RV, Cook calls the three-hour plus presentation he's brought to more than 100 counties, the "Hand Count Roadshow.
" Cook is part of an election conspiracy movement that's been growing since 2020 and claims that voting machines can be hacked and manipulated —meaning the only voting system to be trusted is an old-fashioned hand count. Last year, in deep-red Gillespie County in Central Texas, Cook convinced Republicans who run their own primaries to join the small minority that hand count votes. So, on election night in March, hundreds of volunteers stayed up until as early as 4:30 a.
m. the next morning to hand count roughly 8,000 votes, a process that resulted in numerous errors. "We only have 13 precincts, 12 of which turned in final tally sheets that were inaccurate," Jim Riley, the elections administrator who oversees elections in Gillespie County, told CBS News.
Riley believes there was no problem in Gillespie County that needed to be solved by hand counting ballots. "No, the hand counting, in my opinion, did nothing to improve elections in the county," Riley said. Riley, a Republican, says Gillespie County's systems were already top-notch.
They involved .